FSU plan is good for Bowden and the Seminoles, too

Tuesday

Dec 11, 2007 at 12:01 AMDec 11, 2007 at 7:16 AM

BY DAVE GEORGECox News Service

This is BIG, the announcement by Bobby Bowden that forever is just a little too long for him to coach football at Florida State, and that, for the sake of transitional sanity, it helps to have Jimbo Fisher recognized as his official successor.
ENORMOUS we're still waiting on.
That would be the "when" in this win-win.
When will Bobby decide that the time is right to walk away?
He's only the winningest coach in major college history, remember, the founder of an FSU football feast that includes two national championships, two Heisman Trophy winners and a stunning string of 14 straight finishes in the AP's top five starting in 1987.
Push an icon like this a little too hard and it might just be enough to deny a university president entry to heaven, even one who approved the installation of a stained-glass tribute to Bowden at the stadium in 2004.
T.K. Wetherell knows this better than anyone. FSU's president played for Bowden, loves the man dearly and understands in a larger sense what it means to have a championship coach who is also a top-flight ambassador for the school.
So it was with immense care that Wetherell, minus the athletic director whom he recently canned, approached Bowden with a one-year contract extension and an accompanying proposal that is, foremost, good for the university. That's smart. Sounds good to Bobby, who has been the smiling face of FSU since computers were the size of refrigerators.
My best guess is that he'll coach another two seasons before giving way to Fisher.
Whenever Bobby says farewell, it's good for the university to have the matter of a successor settled so that FSU won't be put through the humiliation and the confusion that Michigan is tasting today, and that both Alabama and Miami tasted, too. When an elite program finds itself begging people to consider taking over as head coach and then gets rejected in the process by candidates from, say, Rutgers or South Florida, well, it's unseemly.
The compromise is good for Bobby, too, because the Seminoles' flow of prime recruits can begin anew, with everybody understanding that the potential dead end of Bowden's retirement has been addressed. That might even give Bobby a shot at another national title as a going-away present, if everything falls just right a couple of years from now.
Last, this is good for FSU because Fisher won't get away now. Without this deal, he probably would have been announced as Arkansas' new boss Hog this week. Bobby likes Jimbo, having tracked Fisher through three previous stints coaching under Terry Bowden, and trusts him to keep the ball rolling.
These men aren't clones, of course. Bobby is everybody's favorite uncle, a jokester in almost every setting, while Fisher looks like more of a screamer on the sidelines.
Face it, though. The Seminoles have cultivated for decades a sense of country-fried cool under Bobby. Jimbo, in that respect, is about as close to Jim Bob as you can get.
"Hey, you get to 78 years of age, it's hard to say how you're going out," Bowden said. "But we've got a plan. I'm happy. Jimbo's happy. That's what counts."
It's different at Penn State. Keeping Joe Paterno happy is priority one there. Three years ago the university president and athletic director confronted JoePa in his own home, telling him that after four losing records in the space of five seasons it was time to step down.
Paterno shooed the administrators away like children, later saying that his response was something along the lines of, "Relax and get off my backside." The next season he was AP National Coach of the Year with an 11-1 record and a fresh coat of stubbornness.
Bear Bryant showed himself the door in 1982, announcing that he would retire at the end of the season and recommending privately that Gene Stallings take over at Alabama. Just 28 days after his last game as Crimson Tide coach, Bryant died. There followed an extensive period of mourning and shock, compounded by the fact that the great man was only 69, and then Alabama went another way, hiring Ray Perkins instead.
FSU's transition will be much smoother. The only problem that might pop up is a renewed reluctance by Bobby to retire within the limits of Fisher's new three-year contract extension as his offensive coordinator. Maybe Bowden remains convinced, season after season after season, that the Seminoles are right on the cusp of another national championship and wants to coach into his mid-80s. Maybe he just can't stand conceding the title of all-time winningest coach to his old pal Paterno, who is two games back at the moment and too ornery to stop.
In that case, the situation gets ticklish again, and potentially traumatic. I don't see that happening. What Bowden's done here is pledge his cooperation in endorsement of Wetherell's plan. He's not the type to go back on that. Also, Wetherell has demonstrated here the will to make the most emotional and necessary of changes. The next time, if there is a next time, the president won't come to Bowden with some kind of compassionate consensus in mind.
"I imagine a lot of schools couldn't pull this off," Bowden said.
One of the best parts of Bobby's legacy will be that he has voluntarily, intelligently, given in to that pull. It's so much better than a push.
It's one more reason why so many of college football's giant programs wish they had had Bobby to deal with, and to profit from, over the last three decades.